I suspect Neil deGrasse Tyson thought this tweet sounded very clever when he sent it out:

It sounds like it should be true. But it’s not how evolution works. Not even close. Hell, there are plenty of people who can share stories about how sex hurt the first time they did it, or because they were in a wrong position, or because it just does sometimes. (Sex, I’ve heard, can also lead to childbirth. Which is also painful.)

Nature doesn’t give a rip whether or not sex hurts. All that matters is that sex happens. In the reproductive Olympics, successfully producing offspring from the union of gametes gets you ahead in the race.

I’m sure Tyson just wanted the tweet to be amusing, and he wasn’t really thinking of the biological truth of it. But as someone who has a huge platform as a science communicator, you’d think he’d care about both of those points.

***Update***: Tyson just tweeted a link to Willingham’s article, which is at least an admission that he didn’t have all the facts: